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One of the outcomes that was clear from the 7th Digital Dealer Conference is that the demand for more knowledge on Automotive SEO and Social Marketing strategies is very high.
A seminar room, limited to one hour, is just scratching the surface. There is so much confusion in the marketplace that needs to be resolved with openness and skills training; we don't need more sales pitches.
Skills training for Automotive SEO and Social Media is none existent. There has to be a way to get past the "Marketing 101" classes that get repeated at each conference.
So, I was talking with JD Rucker and Paul Rushing about organizing an Automotive SEO and Social Media Boot Camp the day before the NADA show in February to provide in depth training and hands on classes to give car dealers the skills training to perform important tasks on their own or to develop a better understanding of how to strategize and direct their consultants.
It would be a full day of training to build skills and NOT just skimming through important topics. The design is to move past the "101" style classes and dig in for people who want hands on training.
The concept could be outlined like this:
1. Advance registration would allow us to create a full report on the dealer's existing website with suggestions for improvement that will be covered in the boot camp sessions. A review of dealer's online strategies and social media assets will be included in the pre-conference report.
2. Based on the analysis in the custom report, dealer staff would be assigned to different boot camp sessions to be instructed on how to affect changes on their site that will make a difference for search marketing.
3. The sessions would provide hands on training. Everyone would need to come with a laptop so they can change their sites or create content in real-time based on the session leaders directions.
The goal would be to provide enough time to cover a series of important basic SEO tasks and Social Media tasks that all dealers need to know.
For example, showing dealer's staff how to create "effective content pages" and how to add them to their website to increase organic search traffic for particular keyword phrase. Once the page is added to their site, how to drive traffic and links to that new page. Most website platforms now allow page creation on the fly but few dealers are leveraging this technology.
Sessions on using blogs and social media tools like Digg, Twitter and Facebook that push beyond the basic 101 discussion to show traffic generation strategy, data and real results.
If you think this is a valid concept and are heading to NADA, and would be interested, send me an email: brian@paschconsulting.com. We will want to keep the classroom sizes smaller and manageable but we need to see how much demand is in the market.